paloma's journal

earlier this week, i worked an AV gig that was located on the hundredth floor of a building in manhattan. i took a lot of photos up there.

last week, i was on semi-vacation and did a lot of patching in touchdesigner for week of patching. i wasn't able to post every day, but i did 5/7, and got a lot more comfortable with the program, which was the main goal. now that i have a better understanding of its functionality, i think it will be very useful to me in the future, but i also see where its limitations are. i am realizing that i will still need to get better at writing shader code to accomplish everything i want to digitally — but touchdesigner also makes working with shaders easier. and of course there is still plenty more to explore.

on saturday, we hiked up a mountain called "sleeping giant," and on sunday, we went to my partner's sister's birthday party, and swam in their lake.

on my return from my city trip this week, the sky got very smoky from wildfires somewhere, and it looked like the sun was a small orange orb barely visible through the gray atmosphere.

that's all for now. till next time...

this morning, i walked to the coffee shop, intending to sit there for a bit and plan out the rest of my day. i brought my backpack, but it turned out that i forgot to pack the e-ink device i usually use for taking notes.

thankfully, i had this little contraption in my pocket (well, technically, in my fanny pack, because i don't like to transfer things between clothing pockets all the time). i would call it my pocket notebook, but in truth, it's not really a notebook at all. it is a couple of leaves of warm-colored cardstock, cut down to 5.5 by 6 inches, and center-folded with the paper's grain. instead of actually binding them into a notebook, i just secure them to a piece of thicker cardboard with a rubber band, and a pen tucked in as well. the cardboard is cut down from some random packaging, with an extra quarter inch of margin on each side.

this little bundle of papers was the result of a long quest and some trial and error. but in the end, this specific method has won over all of the pre-made notebooks and pads i've tried, as well as my other hand-bound notebook experiments. it may not be perfect for everyone, but it's perfect for me for the following reasons:

• the cardstock is thick enough for me to use both sides with no bleed-through, and is pleasant to write on.
• individual leaves are better than a binding for me because it takes the pressure off — if i draw something terrible that i never want to look at again, i can simply remove that leaf from the stack. (in regular notebooks, i often either rip stuff out, or just don't use them because i don't want to "mess them up.")
• if i have a table or flat surface to write on, the leaves can be unfolded to their full size, and lay flatter than most notebooks.
• if i don't have a flat surface, i just remove the rubber band and use the cardstock itself as a rigid backing.
• the cardboard keeps the whole thing flat so the rubber band doesn't curl the paper. it also provides a little bit of protection against the corners getting bent in my pocket.
• it's extremely lightweight.
• it's modular — all of the pieces come apart and can be replaced individually.
• if i leave the whole thing behind by accident, i can make a new one in a few minutes, for a total cost of a dollar or two.

i use it to doodle when hanging out with people or waiting for food at a restaurant. i also use it for writing things down when i'm away from my larger bags and items. it helps me avoid looking at my smartphone, which i feel is rude in social situations, and which i often dislike using when alone as well. (any notebook can be a good alternative to certain types of screen time, but if it's not one i actually want to carry with me all the time, it doesn't help with this.)

i usually carry three blank folded sheets with me at a time, and i have a stack of extras pre-cut on the shelf, so i can swap out the used notes with new blanks. depending on what's on the used notes, i usually don't need them anymore. the process of writing or sketching is important to me, as a form of synthesis. most of the artifacts become irrelevant quickly, or i copy down the information somewhere else if i need it for later. but if i ever end up with a bunch i want to keep, i could easily add a pamphlet stitch to bind them into a real book.

after my rabbit hole of trial and error, i settled on this method and just... stopped thinking about it. i kept using it, and began to take its presence for granted. i only thought of it again today because it saved my butt as i sat down in the coffee shop, writing my to-do list. so this is a note of appreciation for my little "notebook," and also a note about the particular specs that worked for me.

the other photos are from my walk through the cemetery, which is between me and the coffee shop.

it rained all day today. i kept thinking that the sky must run out of water, but it still hasn't.

i decided to write again today because i randomly remembered two scenes from recent dreams:

• last night, in my dream, i saw a UFO with my eyes open. i was afraid at first because i thought it was falling, towards me, but then it zoomed up and away. then it like melted away and i realized that i had been dreaming, but thought i was awake now. (but i was still dreaming, my eyes weren't really open...i was still just looking at the dream world). looking back, missed opportunity for lucid dreaming, which is usually triggered by realizing you're dreaming. but i thought i had woken up already, and seeing a UFO didn't seem that crazy to me at the time. therein lies the difficulty of realizing i am dreaming.
• the other night, not sure when exactly, i dreamed i was in a public swimming pool area that i'd reached just by walking down the street. there was no gate, just a swimming pool and public bathrooms with showers, accessible right from the sidewalk. i remember thinking, "europe is so much more advanced." i guess the dream was set in europe, maybe only because i assumed i must be there because of the nice pool (not sure if that's a logical conclusion).

today, i got started on my touch designer patching for "week of patching." i ended up staying up late, and spending more time on the computer than i normally do, and feeling a bit mentally scattered. i am looking forward to doing more patching this week, but i hope i can avoid the scattered attention that comes along with spending more time on social media and youtube and doing too many little things in a short time.

i am writing another entry because things have been pretty eventful. yesterday we went to a friend's house for a fourth of july party (it's the anniversary of the founding of the united states, though most people reading this will know that). the fourth of july is, somewhat ironically, also the anniversary of my relationship with my lovely partner andrei. (eight years, wow!) anyway, i was worried because i knew the party was going to be outside (our friend lives on the beach), but it turned out to be fine. it was slightly cooler (only 90 degrees, lol), there was shade, and it turns out that swimming in the ocean cools you down a lot. that's something humans have probably known for a long time, so i felt sort of silly that it was a revelation to me.

we hung out with people, and ate turkish food and a tasty frozen dessert that andrei made, with frozen bananas, peanut butter, and chocolate on a nut-flour shortbread. as we left the party near sundown, we saw a gathering storm on the horizon. on the drive home, we were just in time to catch a glimpse of every fireworks display between new haven and shoreline. there were a lot of different ones, and we stopped a couple times briefly to watch. on the bridge over the bay, they were setting them off on the shore right below, and they were exploding right above us. with my car's roof open, it felt slightly dangerous to be that close to the explosions, though the biggest danger was probably people being distracted while driving.

as if that was not dramatic enough, less than a mile from our house, a monsoon-level amount of rain started pouring down, and i had to pull over and wait until i could see literally anything through the windshield. when we finally turned onto our block, we had to drive through a few inches of water flooding the road. today, i saw a lot of leaves on the ground (green ones), and some terrifyingly large branches that had fallen (one sycamore branch was like a foot in diameter).

the nice thing is that the rain coincided with the heat wave breaking. though i normally wouldn't call this weather cool, it was a welcome shift, and we celebrated by going on a walk in the morning. we stopped by a local cafe and then the farmers' market.

now, i'm at the community art space because my partner and our friends are doing a closing performance for the group video art exhibition. i biked over here and now i'm waiting for it to start.

in between these things, i've been doing a bit of computery stuff. i'm preparing for my week of patching, which starts tomorrow! i created a log page to track my experiments, which is blank now but will be added to soon. and i also documented the final items i made for zine club, and wrote a blog post about zine club ending and AV club beginning. so it's been "officially" announced now.

tomorrow, i'm working during the day, but i'm excited to start patching in the evening. i think i am going to primarily focus on creating patches inside of touch designer, a node-based platform for creating mostly visual things. i've been wanting to delve deeper into it since making the patch that became a zine called "vessels," so i hope this will be the opportunity/motivation for me to take the time to do so.

i am writing this without my glasses on, because they've been irritating my nose. the downside to this is that i can't see shit. oh well, pardon any typos.

last weekend, as i mentioned in my last entry, we went to upstate NY to play a show and stayed for a three-day weekend in a house that our friends rented. i am from an area near where we went, and i've never felt what it's like to experience the area as a "tourist" until now. it was surprisingly nice despite the irony! we went to a lake, and lots of nice coffee shops and bookstores, and two very good restaurants. i did feel like i was cosplaying, and it was kind of funny. the show was also very nice — i already wrote a bit about it for my blog post, which i linked to earlier in this paragraph, and which also contains a recording of our set.

when we got home, i went back into a busy work week and found that my fabrication order had been delivered. it was the last mystery object for zine club, and it's still too soon to risk spoiling the surprise, but i was very pleased with the results. i prepared and mailed out all of the shipments, and in the process, i officially launched my new project, AV club, which is replacing zine club moving forward. so far, i've only shared it with the zine club member list, and i haven't posted about it anywhere else yet, but already we have 15 members. yay!

i started reading a book called wisdom wide and deep by shaila catherine, which is about concentration practice in buddhism. it's been a while since i've done much reading on the topic, though i have continued to practice meditation somewhat regularly. so far in the book, everything i've read is stuff that i've heard multiple times before, but i have enjoyed this particular wording of it. reading about buddhist teachings is very interesting because it feels like you can read the same thing each year and get something completely different out of it. so far in this book, i've been reading about the five hindrances, and noticing how much of what i would have previously categorized as 'desire' now seems to me to actually be 'restlessness.' hmm...

there is a very intense heat wave happening in my area this week. we have a window AC unit, which, when run continuously on max, has just barely brought the temperature in our home down to 85ºF (30ºC). i hate running it for so long each day, because it's loud and sapping up all our electricity. but it's been 100ºF outside for four days, and it sadly doesn't seem optional (except at night, when i've just been opening the windows and pointing a lot of fans at myself). i also have been spending less time outside, and exercising less, because the temperature is making me lethargic. i hope it breaks soon, because my health is not being helped by this.

today, i braved the heat to visit a friend who's leaving tomorrow to travel for three months. i was glad that we got to hang out before she left. i set up a ghost instance (open source newsletter software) on my server for her to write about her trip, and keep me and other people updated on here whereabouts. having just set up the ghost instance for AV club last month, the tool was fresh in my mind. i like it ok so far, and it seems practical. i wish more people would use RSS, but for better or worse, i guess that email is much more widely used now for subscribing to things.

ok, it's getting late, and time for me to stop trying to look at things without my glasses on. good night!

things have been pretty normal. it feels like there isn't much to write about, but it's a good exercise to think about what happened anyway.

i went back to the city for one last AV gig of the season, and had a fancy meal with my friend who i stay with most often there. it was the fanciest meal that i've ever gone out to by my own initiative (usually in my life, when i've ended up at fancy restaurants, it was because other people wanted to, and it wasn't my preferred choice.) it was very good, and all of the calories i expended lugging projectors around were replenished.

i have a project i've been working on that i haven't announced yet, so i'll call it project X. i knew that i needed to be ready to launch project X by the end of the month, and also make some good progress on a website i'm building for an artist friend. and i also knew i was going on a trip for the last weekend of the month (that's tomorrow!), so i spent the previous weekend hunkering down and working a lot on both. but i also went to weird music night on saturday, and a movie theater on sunday, both with andrei. we saw the furious, a new martial arts movie, and we enjoyed it. (it is violent though, so if you see it, be warned: they spend more time hitting each other than not.)

besides that, we also went for some hikes and walks. and we went to another movie on wednesday night, but it wasn't good. i finished watching battlestar galactica, which i started last august. i liked it overall, but

after a few months of shifting things around my sporadic gigs in the city, i have returned to my default four-day schedule at my art studio job. thor, the dog who belongs to the artists i work for, got sick this week, and i ended up having to take him to the animal hospital. thankfully, he seems ok now. i have been doing some rather rote inventory management, but i got to dive into some rhino and grasshopper stuff to revise a design for compatibility with autocad file formats, which was an enjoyable challenge for me. (turns out ellipses are bad, but arcs are fine. i learned about how to create multiple tangent arcs to approximate ellipses. my online research brought me into the history of stonemasonry.)

tomorrow, we're going on a trip to upstate new york, and we are going to do a live performance on saturday, and spend the weekend with our friends (one of whom is also performing) in the woods. so i'm looking forward to that. i am not sure how "chill" of a trip it can be since we do have to play that show, but i'm going to try to take it as easy as possible, and start reading at least one new book. i probably won't do any hiking, because i have a strain in my foot arch and knee. and i want to rest, because when i get home, it will be a busy week. i will have to mail out a mysterious object, and i get to announce project X!

wow, i am so tired. it is sunday night, after a very eventful weekend. my younger sibling came to visit me, and we went to a very large thrift store in my area. we spent three hours there, and i obtained at least a year's worth of new clothes. my younger sibling is my personal fashion consultant, so it was helpful to have them with me in that process. in particular, i got a lot of light, flowy, natural-fiber clothing, to help me cope with the hot weather. they also helped me cull and organize my wardrobe in general. i have a bag of things to donate, and more space for the new things i found. i'm actually excited to wear my clothes now, which i must say i haven't felt in a pretty long time.

we also did some bleach dyeing with another friend who came over to hang out. i did my usual bleach-dyeing technique, which involves throwing splatters of bleach randomly onto my clothes and hoping they come out cool. but my sibling and friend both did very careful, intricate designs that they painted onto the clothing with a brush. even though it was both of their first time trying doing it, the results were very cool, and i think i'll try it too next time, in addition to my random splashing.

today, my sibling left, and my partner returned from a 2 week family trip to alaska. so we went on a long walk together and caught up. it was pretty hot again today, for the fourth day in a row, but i read that it's supposed to cool off tomorrow. i hope the cooler weather leaves me feeling a bit less drained...

i went to the city to work some AV gigs. i helped set up screens for a tent event at the central park zoo. i had not been there before. we were working near the sea lion enclosure, and they were watching us with curiosity.

i was traveling very light, which was nice. besides a change of clothes and toothbrush, i just brought my e-ink tablet and my phone with some locally downloaded episodes of battlestar galactica. between working, sleeping, and hanging out with friends, the only time i had to kill was the train ride itself. so i decided not to even pretend i was going to get anything done!

i got back pretty late last night, but decided to go to my other job early today anyway, to force my sleep schedule back towards "normal" (it hasn't been the same since my trip to mexico). well, i think it worked, because i am extremely tired.

i was reading an article earlier about how many people entering college today do not have the basic reading and writing skills that would have been taken for granted in decades of the recent past. i was thinking about how both AI and the whole shortform video content thing are perfect allies in destroying people's brains. i also don't want to assume the smugness of a person who says, "i'm smarter than you all because i do not do these things." it's such a strange time, and god knows the youth will figure out their own way to have intellectual lives... i hope.

anyway, i'm going to keep reading and writing, and where it makes sense, creating diagrams and other visual aids. i won't read my writing aloud to make it more accessible to people, for better or worse. the only videos i make will be long, weird, and, as a critic (like, an actual art critic) once described my work: "challenging to the attention span."

p.s. the article about people not knowing how to read had a typo.

i went to another art opening today! this time it was one that i was in. it was curated by my friend kit, who is also my neighbor, and it was at our local community art space which is called ely center.

the title of the exhibition is restructuring realities, and it's all video work, much of it analog, glitch-based, or abstract. kit put so much work into putting it all together, and scrounged up all of the equipment from friends and his own collection. for a show with 15 video works, that was no small feat.

since i haven't been very active since i got back from my trip, i decided to walk there and back. it was a little bit warm out but it was a nice walk nonetheless. i saw a lot of people in their sunday clothes, including some people standing in front of the masonic lodge wearing tuxedos, and a parade truck covered in people protesting yale's tax evasion. i walked a total of 6 or 7 miles.

i went an art opening at a museum today, which the artists i work for had some work in. my favorite art that i saw was actually in a book in the gift shop, of works by an artist named karla knight.

i am slightly jetlagged, but i stayed up later last night than could be justified by that alone. i actually was obsessively working on a new project, which i will talk more specifically about soon. so i ended up going to bed when it was getting light out.

miraculously, i wasn't tempted to keep working on it today, so i was able to do more normal human things such as clean my house. i also didn't have an energy crash, which was also lucky. i think i've gotten past the "proof of concept" phase of the project i was working on. i think the reason i spent so much time on it yesterday is because that phase is very addictive. successfully doing something you weren't sure would work can be very gratifying. now the rest of the project is just leg work and stuff i already know i can do, which is a bit less exciting. and that's actually a good thing because i have a few other things that really should have been in front of it in the queue.

i spent the past week in mexico, visiting my parents, who officially moved there this year. it was my first time visiting guanajuato, the city where they now live. it is a very interesting place; it's an old city nestled between mountains in the high desert (at 7000 feet / 2300 meters in altitude). there are many mazelike alleys that are only accessible by foot, as they are narrow, steep, and riddled with cobbled stairs. i was glad my parents came to meet me when i arrived, because it would have been very difficult for me to find the unmarked door of their building on my own.

from the roof of their apartment, and in many other high points in the city, you can see the dense arrangement of centuries-old buildings, stacked practically on top one another as they ascend the slopes of the surrounding mountains. to supplement the few streets which had been built wide enough to accomodate carriages, a dense, equally complex network of tunnes was excavated beneath the city at the beginning of the period where cars became prevalent.

i'm not sure if it's lucky (for structural integrity) or unlucky (for the tunnel builders who bored though it), but most of the ground there is solid rock. my understanding is that the town was originally built around mining, and that it once was the world's capital of silver (citation needed). there is also a long tradition of stone carving, which you can see in carved architectural details everywhere.

one of the most interesting visual things i noticed was the contrast between the grandness of the older architecture and the chaos of later modifications, often equally represented in the same structure. in accordance with mexican tradition, the solution to every building problem is: more cement. need a new bench or shelf? need to prevent ATVs from squishing a soft plastic hose that serves as the water line to an entire building? need to re-attach an errant tile or stone? more cement!

i spent a lot of time walking around, and we had a small party with my parents' friends, and saw some live music performances. i also explored the area around the reservoirs with a new friend, and went to a figure drawing club and made some other new friends (it was a club where everyone takes turns modeling), and saw the editor of a newspaper i used to write for when i was a kid (who now lives there too).

i didn't bring my laptop with me, and though i did do a little bit of internet research for an upcoming project, it was a rare time where i stepped away from almost all of my usual business. now i'm back home, and getting back into it all...

i am mostly making this journal entry to share two photos i took, both at golden hour. one of them is of some geese, and i took it today while taking a long walk in the park with a friend. the other one was taken near central park between some a/v shifts last week.

i also will write a little bit about what's been going on, but since it's already getting late, i will be brief.

we played the show in boston the weekend before last and it went well! i still have not succeeded in gathering any visual evidence yet, but when i do i will make a blog post about it. i really enjoyed the change of pace of performing live music/audio instead of visuals, and i will likely try out a few variations of similar ideas, letting andrei handle the visuals for the next few collaborative sets we do.

then, i spent 3 days in the city last week and did a bunch of a/v work. some of it required a radical shift of my sleep schedule, but i seem to have handled it pretty well. i spent a lot of time reading in central park in the long break between setup and strike calls. and i think that working long shifts doing very physical work actually jump started my metabolism, in a good way?? really did not expect that but it seems to have happened.

this past weekend, i did very little besides clean my (office) room (ending the reign of post-show chaos), reset my general systems/to-do lists, and spend many hours reading in my hammock. it was incredibly warm and nice outside, in the shade beneath the maple tree in our backyard. i have been very engrossed in the book i'm reading, but it's very long so i'm still just barely halfway done. even when i am doing other things, in my mind i'm looking forward to when i get the chance to read more.

i found out that a thing i was really hoping would happen is not going to happen. and not only that, but i also found out that the chances of it happening were much lower than i previously thought. sorry for being vague, but i don't want to go into specifics here right now. what i will say is: i've tried taking a few different paths in my "career", and i'm still searching for what feels like a right direction to take for the longer term future.

a part of me is jealous of people who have been doing the same thing for many years in a row, such that other people can look at their job history and see them as qualified for something. but then again, i can't change the part of my personality that seeks breadth over depth and can't stay on a single narrow path. and i think that it is actually kind of a positive quality, though it's not one that society seems to reward. i have some ideas of things i might try to do, but i'm not sure yet. thankfully, things are fine in the short term so i've got time to stew on it.

on wednesday we went to troy, ny to see a show by secret chiefs 3. it was really good, wow! as one would expect from them, there were microtonal guitars, crazy time signatures, and ridiculous synchronization. it was the kind of show that makes you wish you spent 10,000 hours learning an instrument. but they're not just good in a navel-gazey intellectual way. they also make you want to jump around!

now we are back home, but we have to go to the boston area tomorrow to perform a show ourselves. i'm doing live music(? it's not the most musical but it's sounds for sure!) i finally figured out exactly what i'm gonna do, and it involves live sampling a radio with granular synthesis, vocals(!), and a continuumini (a small controller that you play with one finger and it also has a synth built into it). i was thinking of incorporating some pre recorded sounds/samples but i was able to get enough variety from my live techniques that i didn't feel the need to. so it's all live... and pretty improvisational (since i don't know what will be on the radio, and then i have to play along with those samples). i hope it goes well!

here's my setup/plan so far for performing live sound this saturday. among other more computer-y things, i will have a foley box with a microphone, and black cloth in the box to damp the sound, and so that the feed from a camera pointing into the box can be keyed in with the visuals / interact with the video feedback.

i keep starting journal entries with a note about how busy i have been. so when i say now that i've continued to be very busy, i want to state that it is no exaggeration. as someone who thrives on having at least some time each week for unstructured existence, this is not my preferred mode of operation... but there are some times of year when everyone seems to agree that everything needs to happen all at once, and this part of spring seems to be one of them.

here is some of what has been going on:

i worked two more AV event gigs at the natural history museum in manhattan. one of them was a strikedown that went late and i was there until 3am. i felt kind of hungover for a couple days after that; though i consumed no alcohol, it was the same feeling.

a couple days after that, i helped out with a show that andrei organized at ely center here in new haven, which we had 3 friends from out of town come and play at. so we were also hosting a bit, and i shot video footage and photos of all 5 performers in the show. i didn't expect to have as much energy for that as i did, but everyone did such a great job that i was very engaged throughout. i will include some of the photos i shot from that below.

i interviewed and prepared more materials for a still-currently-secret thing. i hope to find out soon how that is going to shake out. i will say more about what it is later if things move forward...

we hosted a party in our backyard yesterday in celebration of andrei's birthday. we did tie dyeing and lots of people came over, and much chips and dips were eaten. i drank half of a 3mg THC-infused lemonade (so 1.5mg). for someone like me who has no tolerance, that was a perfect amount to be enjoyable without actually impairing any of the functionality i needed for post-party cleaning. we also had another friend visiting who stayed over (two weekends in a row with houseguests!) we watched southland tales, which is a pretty terrible but funny movie. then, this morning, we all went to the diner near the west haven train station, which is the best diner we've found so far in the area.

i also participated in capitalism! i visited several thrift stores over the past few weeks, and i found some things that i was very pleased with, including:

• a vacuum cleaner that normally retails for at least $400, which is from a brand who claims they design their appliances to last 20 years. (it was in brand new condition!)
• some clothes
• a new hat (in the "baseball cap" form factor)
• a new bag — i suppose you could call it a purse — which i like because it holds its shape when sitting open, so i can easily fetch items from it while at work
• one of those kids' science kits for growing your own crystals (i gave this to andrei for their birthday so they can make time lapses!)

i also purchased something that was not from a thrift store: namely, a new e-ink drawing tablet / digital notebook thing. i have another one that is older and larger form the same company, which i have been using at my desk, but which was too big for me to want to carry with me anywhere. i sort of use hand-written diagrams and sketches as an extension of my thinking process, so i was previously using pieces of scrap paper, but i grew to really enjoy using the e-ink notepad as a sort of whiteboard (like, "disposable" notes, as opposed to notes i actually want to keep and reference later, which would be in my obsidian vault.) i also like the ability to erase things, since as a left-handed person, pencils are my enemy. and also, i stopped accumulating little crumpled-up pieces of paper.

long story short, after some deliberation, i decided to buy another digital e-ink notebook in a smaller form factor so i can carry it with me. so far it's been nice!

i must admit that a lot of the draw for me is that using them is more fun than a regular analog notebook. that's part of why, somewhere in my mind, it feels a bit wasteful to purchase a new electronic device for such a purpose. but if drawing notes is more fun, i'm more likely to do it, so perhaps i shouldn't criticize myself for that? it feels very nice to use a digital device that isn't connected to the internet. (i leave the wi-fi off on both of them, which also helps the battery life. for my use case as a thinking-scratchpad, there isn't much point in backing up my note files.) sure, a regular notebook doesn't have internet either. but the ability to just delete pages at will makes it feel like one of those stones that you paint on with water, and the image fades. there is a kind of low key zen magical-ness to it.

in less fun news, i have been having pain in my foot arches. because i have been so active, i haven't had time to pause and recover, so i've been experimenting with different shoe/insole combinations, and trying to remember to stretch more. i think i have plantar fasciitis? but i don't really want to go to an actual medical person at the moment (u.s. healthcare system, enough said) so i'm hoping to figure out how to manage it on my own for now.

i guess i'll wrap this up, as i'm not sure what else to write about. bye for now!